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The peer-to-peer SMS network helping farmers connect

There are 500 million smallholder farmers around the world, many of whom have no internet access. These farmers are often several miles walk from the nearest village, totally disconnected from the information that could make their farms more productive and profitable.

While initiatives such as Facebook's controversial Internet.org are trying to get more people online, some are taking a more low-fi approach: using simple mobile phones and SMS to connect the offline world. "For the foreseeable future it's always going to be a bottom of the pyramid population that are reliant on SMS," Kenny Ewan, CEO of London-based startup WeFarm tells WIRED. Which is why his company has created a kind of social network that operates entirely through SMS.

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WeFarm, launched out of the Cafédirect Producers' Foundation in 2011, describes itself as "the internet for people with no internet". Its 43,000 users in Kenya, Peru and Uganda have to date sent more than 5.2 million text messages, asked 57,000 questions and received 97,000 answers. And the whole thing is completely free to use and relies on peer-to-peer advice. Anyone on the service can ask a question and anyone else can send an answer.

WeFarm

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Once a farmer is signed up to WeFarm, a process that requires sending an SMS to a local shortcode number, they can start asking questions. WeFarm's back-end scans the message for keywords and quickly sends it out to people in the local area that it thinks might have an answer. Profiles are built up over time, so if someone answers a lot of questions about growing carrots, they might be flagged as a carrot expert. "The platform itself is all based online but 90-odd percent of the users are completely offline," says Ewan. "What it practically means is that a farmer 20 miles from the nearest village in Kenya can send a totally free SMS message outlining a question and get a response."

Questions are typically answered in less than an hour, according to Ewan. WeFarm automatically picks out the best answers and sends on a small selection.

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It also works in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Swahili, with questions translated by volunteers -- often university students wanting to practice -- before being shared globally. "[The translators] aren't actually influencing the exchange of that knowledge so it's not like a westerner telling somebody what to do," Ewan explains. "I quite like that balance."

For the foreseeable future it's always going to be a bottom of the pyramid population that are reliant on SMS,Kenny Ewan, CEO, WeFarm

"The ultimate goal has to be freedom of information and being able to exchange that. A lot of NGOs are of the mentality that we can't send anything to our farmers unless we filter it first, which I'm not sure is altogether a healthy approach to things."

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But on a totally open system with little intervention, how can quality responses be guaranteed? "It's the single question we get asked the most," Ewan says. "We try to encourage the community to police itself. We looked at the sort of thing eBay does, where users are rating each other, but with knowledge being the transaction instead of goods."

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And farmers on opposite sides of the globe are already sharing advice. Ewan gives the example of Jacob Gituma, a Kenyan farmer who sent a message to the service looking for advice about keeping rabbits on his farm. "He was able to ask questions and get information from someone who'd been keeping rabbits for 20 or 30 years on their farm. He was a farmer in Kenya. His question got answered in Peru."

WeFarm

While the messages being sent over WeFarm aren't always totally serious, Ewan is confident that giving people a low-cost, easy way to get crucial information can have a big impact. "It's just remarkable how people use things in ways that you've never thought about. A lot of people suddenly started using it for sharing their information of what wives or husbands they would want, which, we hadn't envisaged. We kind of filter that stuff out." "It's not always what you'd expect. I think you have this Western belief that people should use it for something very fundamental and powerful. They just want to ask a random question that's obviously been nagging them for years."

Aside from expanding into more countries (Brazil, Colombia and India are all being explored), Ewan says the next step for the system is to become more intelligent and pick out "pieces of knowledge that are beneficial to everyone".

A lot of NGOs are of the mentality that we can't send anything to our farmers unless we filter it first, which I'm not sure is altogether a healthy approach to things.Kenny Ewan, CEO, WeFarm

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Ewan explains about 45 percent of people who sign up actively contribute answers and questions, helping to build up WeFarm's data backend. By collecting anecdotal information at scale from remote areas, the startup hopes to spot problems early. In the future it could inform its users about diseases affecting crops or impending droughts.

shortages, disease and trends within supply chains that could be useful for governments and NGOs."

The smallholder farmers Ewan and his company are targeting remain vitally important to the world's food supply, but many lose up to half their crops before they can be harvested due to disease and other issues. "If you can do it on a big enough scale you'd be able to track it over hundreds of thousands or millions of farmers over a country," says Ewan. "So, for example, last week we saw a couple of questions that looked like they were talking about foot and mouth disease. If you can start to track outbreaks of that where nobody else can that is obviously both helpful and a perfect business model."